Mysticism by Simon Critchley
The British philosopher Simon Critchley and I share a heroine, it would seem, in Julian of Norwich, the plague-era anchoress whose record of the visions she experienced during a bout of near-fatal illness at age 30 just so happens to be the first known book by a woman writing in the English language. Critchley returns to Julian often throughout his latest book, Mysticism, installing her at the fore of a pantheon of mystical thinkers both medieval and postmodern. Meister Eckhart makes the cut, along with many a starving, levitating, socially outcast female saint, but so too does the modernist poet T.S. Elliot, the goth-rock idol Nick Cave, and the transcendentally inclined pastoralist Annie Dillard. For Critchley, mysticism is not a strictly religious endeavor, despite its decidedly non-secular associations. Instead, mysticism is a process and a practice, a discipline and a mode of experience, defined by intensity, ecstasy, and luminous insight. Deep, intentional involvement with the arts can therefore offer as ready a route to mystical sublimity as prayer once supplied the saints, with the same potential to re-enchant our daily reality. We have not lost access to the rapture that might liberate us from the ruts and rigidities into which we’ve settled, Critchley argues; we’ve simply fallen out of the habit. The strange wonder of living remains ever present, always waiting within reach of those willing to put in the effort to receive it.
For fans of the numinous, jargon-free philosophy, medieval curiosities, and agonies and/or ecstasies.
Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut by Elsa Richardson
Pitching us on a rapid descent from the supernal to the altogether earthy is medical historian Elsa Richardson’s probing investigation into our entrails, Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut. Not a scientific but rather a cultural study of the human digestive system, Rumbles concerns itself with Western civilization’s oft-oscillating but consistently ambivalent understandings of, and sentiments towards, that dark stretch of grumbling, growling, churning, roiling viscera that begins between our lips and ends…well, elsewhere. Richardson samples a varied literature of all things alimentary, from contemporary microbiology research to Victorian diet advice, to ponder the gut as invoked in popular parlance – do you trust your gut, or find it hard to stomach? in which case, you might just go belly up – and the body politic, as well as its surprising rise to trendiness as the abdominal epicenter of wellness mania. Is the gut still the lowly symbol of the human animal’s base nature it once was, now that celebrity social media confessionals have made IBS chic? And why has dyspepsia, in its legion of uncomfortable manifestations, become the paradigmatic malady of our age? Richardson takes up these questions and many more as she untwists the complexities of humankind’s changing relationship with our bowels.
Would to say this is an ideal read for navel gazers and beyond too bad a joke? So be it. I charge ahead, undaunted.
